Discovering our ancestors

Fu Qiaomei has been affectionately nicknamed by her colleagues and the moniker gives a clue to her line of work. Her nickname is "DNA detective".

The 39-year-old's efforts and persistence have enabled extinct societies to tell their tales, even though their remains and clues to their identity have been compromised, almost beyond recognition, by the passage of time.

Her evidence-backed discoveries of a modern human from Romania dating back 36,000 years with its recent Neanderthal ancestor, and a 14,000-year-old European featuring dark skin and light-colored eyes, who lived during the Ice Age, took academia by storm in 2015-16.

Her decoding of the first and earliest modern human's genome from China opened up new prospects for the genetic study of past East Asians in 2017.

Using cutting-edge paleogenetic (the study of genetic material to uncover the past) techniques, she retrieved the first Denisovan DNA in East Asia from soil in 2020. Denisovans and Neanderthals split into separate branches about 400,000 years ago.

These are just some of the achievements from her exploration of the genetic roots of humankind.

Fu's work in the field of paleontology has played a big part in untangling the early admixture history of modern humans and Neanderthals, and revealing how early agriculture affected European farmers.

"I'd like to be of some service in illuminating the human prehistory of Asia by investigating the ancient genomes of humans, animals and pathogens," Fu says.